FAQ

What is the license key and why is it necessary?

Buoyant Enterprise for Linkerd requires a valid license key to run. The license key is a technical representation of your legal license to use BEL in accordance with the terms of use. You can get a license key for free from the Buoyant portal.

What kind of BEL usage is allowed for free?

Anyone can download and install BEL from the Buoyant portal.

If your company has fewer than 50 employees, you can run BEL for free, including in production environments, regardless of environment, scale, or type of usage. This includes full access to all features available in standard (non-FIPS) downloads of BEL. It does not include access to support.

If your company has 50 employees or more, you can try BEL in non-production environments without restrictions. However, running BEL in production environments requires a paid license, even for non-production environments. See the BEL plans and pricing page for more.

What is the difference between BEL stable releases and open source edge releases?

Buoyant is the creator and maintainer of Linkerd, which is an open source project hosted on GitHub. As part of this work, Buoyant publishes two types of Linkerd packages:

Open source edge releases. These contain the latest code in from the main branch at the point in time when they were cut. This means they have the latest features and fixes, but it also means they don’t have semantic version guarantees for upgrades. Upgrading between edge releases may involve breaking changes, and may involve partial features that are later modified or backed out.

BEL stable releases. These are designed to introduce minimal change to an existing system, both my minimizing the overall delta between releases and do any additional work required to ensure that upgrades and rollbacks between stable releases are seamless and contain no breaking changes. BEL release contain additional features not available in open source.

In short: edge releases optimize for having the latest and greatest features; stable releases optimize for stability and low-risk upgrades.

See our Versions, Platforms, and Deprecation doc for more.